The Book of the Dead (22 page)

“So have you. The thing is that it's all over. Isn't it fun to think that not one living soul knows where we are? We're alone on earth together! At last. No more worry.”

“I couldn't stand any more of it. Darling…”

“Yes?”

“I can't help thinking about that Fisher girl.”

He sat back. “Now don't begin it all over again!”

“But
could
that Billig—”

“It was a hold-up, it must have been a hold-up. Billig wouldn't lose his head like that; and for nothing! She knew nothing; she told that fellow Gamadge nothing.”

“Billig may have thought—”

“Even if he did, what had he to get into such a stew about?”

“You said you thought he might take drugs.”

“Because he needed the two thousand, and lived in such a hole. That's why I thought so. I don't know so.”

“But if he takes drugs he
may
lose his head. He may have lost it and killed that girl. It's such a coincidence. I nearly died when I heard it like that—no preparation.”

“I bet you didn't give a thing away.”

“Gamadge was there; it was frightful.”

“The Fisher girl consulted him about some book or autograph; just as he said. It's his business.”

“You don't think anything's queer; you never do.”

“Yes, I do. I think it was queer that he went to the apartment house on Thursday afternoon and inquired about the flat.”

“There's nothing funny about it if you're right, and Idelia Fisher consulted him professionally. Of course they talked about the whole case—”

“I like your
calling
it a case!”

“When they went up to the hospital together they talked about that poor Mr. Crenshaw; and Gamadge may really have wanted a flat for the summer.”

“Yes, but how did
she
know about the apartment?”

“Asked at the post-office in Stonehill. There was no secret about it, you say. You think I'm nervous! You're imagining all kinds of things.”

“I wasn't the one who imagined that Idelia Fisher consulted Gamadge about the Shakespeare.”

“I still think she did.”

“Why did she?”

“If I knew I shouldn't be wondering about it.”

Their voices had taken on an edge. After a short silence he said: “Lucky I brought that bottle of gin along. I don't know where we should be if we hadn't had a cocktail.” He smiled. “We ought to have had several more. Can't we forget all this? We have pretty good proof that there's nothing in it; if there had been, don't you think we'd have known it before now?”

There was another pause. Then she said in a dry voice: “I wonder if we're going to do this all our lives.'

“Do what?”

“Go over it and over it.”

“No; because we'll be far away. Billig won't tell; not he! I know that type. I saw twenty apartments before I chose that one, with no doctor in it, and the nearest doctor a broken-down M.D. around the corner. I worked it all out like a problem in chess. I watched Billig, and I saw the kind of patients he had. I don't know why he's on his beam-ends, but it's something serious. Blackmail? Or perhaps he
is
mixed up in the drug traffic and taking a drug himself. That runs to money.”

“But if he takes drugs—he may have—he may collapse any time, and tell.”

He smiled. “Are we back there again?”

“I wish I'd asked that Humbert exactly what Gamadge said when he first came to the apartment.”

“Instead of which you let it go.”

“I was afraid Humbert would think I worried about it.”

“You're worrying, all right. Shall we make a vow not to say another thing about it? Stop spoiling the fun?”

“Yes.”

“Good. That's settled. We pulled the thing off, I don't think any job was ever pulled off so neatly as this job was. It's no fault of ours if our late friend stumbled across the Fisher girl at Stonehill. I'd pay money to know how he did stumble across her. It must have been those times while I was down in the village. Sly of him, very sly, to keep it to himself.”

She said rather viciously: “You said you understood him.”

There was something vicious in his face, too, when he replied: “Knew better than to run any risks with me, anyway. But there's an element—the X in any human chemical combination. You can't depend on it. Variable. Well, he's made a lot of trouble and cost this Fisher girl—” He stopped, and looked at her guiltily.

“You do think Dr. Billig killed her! You do!”

They stared at each other. Then he said gently: “How about that vow we made? And where—” his tone changed, he lifted a fork and struck a bell-note on his tumbler—“where the devil is the waitress?”‘

The clear sound of silver on glass might have been a knell to raise a spirit, by the look on her face as she gazed beyond him at the doorway; he turned his head, and he too was frozen and rigid; a man of stone.

Schenck, Gamadge and Boucher came directly up to the table; Schenck went around the woman to sit between her and her companion; Boucher sat down in the chair opposite; Gamadge remained standing; he looked down at the man known as Maxwell with a smile.

“Good evening,” he said. “May we join you?”

Maxwell seemed to be endowed with immense self confidence; it did not quite desert him even now. He replied, after moistening his lips: “I don't know you. What is all this?”

“But Miss Daker knows me. Perhaps she'll introduce me?”

Lucette Daker, in her new coiffure and long skirt, her earrings and her brilliant make-up, seemed much older than she had looked in New York; but her expression, furious and terrified, was what altered her most. She glared speechless at Gamadge, and then turned the same basilisk eye on the man opposite her.

“Since she doesn't care to introduce me,” said Gamadge, “let me introduce myself—though it isn't really necessary. My name is Gamadge, and these are my friends Schenck and Boucher. You and Miss Daker may have seen Schenck at Stonehill, and you probably noticed Boucher, Mr. Maxwell, on the bus. Not yesterday's bus, you know; not the bus Miss Daker came down from Unionboro on.”

Maxwell tapped his fingers gently on the table-cloth. Then he said: “You'd better go upstairs, Lucette; I'll settle this. It's an outrage, but I suppose even a gang of private detectives can be made to understand that it won't be worth their while to press a morals charge; and that's the only charge they could possibly hold us on.”

Gamadge said: “I really wouldn't go, Miss Daker. You have rights, even if you did treat poor Mr. Judd Binney in a most shocking way. He was your alibi, I see that—and Mr. Maxwell's. We weren't to look beyond Mr. Binney when you faded from the scene.”

She had risen, and now screamed at him: “We quarrelled yesterday. We quarrelled!”

“Nonsense; he has gone off on his ship thinking that if he comes back you'll marry him. He was to find a letter saying you'd changed your mind, and asking him to forget you. You were going to write to your aunt, though, as you told me, and say you'd married him. But I wasn't convinced by poor Binney, you know; people like you are not likely to throw themselves away on Binneys; they hunt bigger game.”

Maxwell said: “Lucette, you don't have to listen—” but she shrieked at him: “You said I'd be safe! You said you'd take care of me!”

He looked at her silently; the basilisk had turned his pale, stricken face to a death-mask.

Gamadge shook his head at her: “You mustn't put too much faith in human promises, Miss Daker. And you've been awfully bad for him, you know; you turned him into a murderer. He killed Idelia Fisher, and if he'd had a chance he would have killed me afterwards. Didn't you know?”

The man came to life at that. He interrupted harshly: “What do you mean? I was at Stonehill.”

“Not that night. They didn't know at Stonehill that you were ever away between the twenty-second and yesterday afternoon, but it was the simplest thing in the world for you to drive down by devious routes, park your car somewhere in Unionboro, and take the express to New York. You saw Billig a few minutes before I did on Wednesday night; you heard that Idelia and I had been at the hospital, and were perhaps even than at Buckley's; you went after us both within the next hour. You missed me, and you couldn't try again; you had to catch the 12:01 to Unionboro. My friends here saw you while you were on your way home to the Crenshaw house—they got to Stonehill a few minutes after you did. I couldn't go up, you know; you saw me with Idelia on Wednesday night after we left Buckley's; if you'd caught a glimpse of me at Stonehill you'd have been scared off, and we might have lost you. Or would you have shot me on sight?”

Maxwell pulled himself together; he raised his eyes to the girl who was staring at him. “This is what they call shock tactics, Lucette; we mustn't let them stampede us. There's absolutely no evidence that I was ever in New York after the twenty-second. There's no evidence at all.”

Gamadge said: “Billig—”

“Billig!” Maxwell laughed.

“Billig states that you called on him last Wednesday night, paid him one thousand dollars (the remaining half of his fee), and heard of Idelia Fisher for the first time. Not knowing what you were capable of, or that you had reason to commit murder, he gave you her address, and the information—just received over the telephone from Mr. Thompson of St. Damian's—that she and I were on our way to Buckley's. I may add that Dr. Billig himself is not involved in the murder. He has an effective alibi for the murder; his time is fully accounted for. Idelia was killed within half an hour of the time I found her body, and during that half hour Billig was on his way to the Jeremiah H. Wood Home, in the East Fifties. They know when he got there.”

Maxwell said loudly: “Inference.” His light eyes, just showing beneath pale lashes, were fixed on Gamadge's with cold intensity.

“Inference,” agreed Gamadge. “I am fully aware of the fact that you may never be tried for that murder at all. But as you know very well, you can be tried for a felony—since we've caught you, and if we can hang on to you until Mrs. Crenshaw gets here from New York.”

The light eyes blinked and shifted. Lucette Daker got up and stood clinging to the edge of the table. Her lips formed the words: “New York?”

“I called her up yesterday afternoon and asked her to stay on,” said Gamadge. “Called her up from the Grand Central, you know.”

She gazed at him. “That time you—that time—”

“I'm afraid so.”

“Even
then
you—” she had found her voice, and it expressed something like horror.

“I'm afraid so, Miss Daker. I was trying to find out who had killed my client. Well, as I said, your friend may never stand trial for that murder; but he'll stand trial for the felony, and we'll hold him now on a Federal charge. Mr. Schenck is an agent of the F.B.I., and can make the arrest.”

Maxwell asked roughly: “What Federal charge? What are you talking about? There can't be one.”

“There is one, and in less shocking circumstances the fact would be laughable. Your grave error. In the course of building up a fraud you falsified or conspired to falsify documents; that's the felony. And for that purpose you used the United States mails; don't you remember your letter to Mr. Humbert, Mr. Maxwell? That's the Federal offense. The letter was mailed in Stonehill on the third of July.”

Maxwell's thin lips moved. “Frame-up.”

“But who would frame you, Mr. Maxwell?”

Maxwell seemed to huddle down into his chair; but that effect was caused only by a narrowing of the shoulders, a drawing in of the legs and feet. Otherwise he did not move.

“Such a beautiful, such a perfect plan,” said Gamadge. “Why did you ruin it by lending the dying man your volume of Shakespeare, Crenshaw? He was your cousin, wasn't he? I thought there must have been a family likeness; it would have looked suspicious to cremate him, and somebody might have described the body to your wife.”

Lucette Daker gasped: “That girl—I knew she brought you that book for some reason!”

“Don't waste resentment on her,” said Gamadge. “If I had had no more information than what she could give me I shouldn't be here now. It was the book itself that told me the story. The dead man wasn't the owner—couldn't be the owner; he was a reader of Shakespeare; he wouldn't have brought that Shakespeare with him on his long journey—a bound, battered, closely printed volume out of a family set.

“But if he had? If I was wrong? No: I wasn't wrong about the ownership of that Shakespeare. If it was his only Shakespeare, why was it as fresh between its disintegrating covers as when it had first come from the printers, one hundred and four years ago?

“The man posing as Howard Crenshaw wasn't Howard Crenshaw; he was somebody—one of those cousins from Omaha?—who had borrowed a volume of Shakespeare from the Crenshaw library; a volume stamped with a Crenshaw name. But Howard Crenshaw must have been close at hand; to sign papers in New York and Stonehill, to sign checks, to write home. Was Pike Howard Crenshaw? I thought so.”

Crenshaw said: “There's no motive.”

“No financial motive, none. But there are others even more powerful. How does one get rid of a blameless wife who won't divorce? Only by death; so when your cousin came to you, and asked your help, and told you that he was dying of leukemia, you decided to be the one to die. You shouldn't have trusted him not to talk to strangers, Crenshaw; you shouldn't have lent him that book out of your library at Sundown. You should have drowned it first,
deeper than did ever plummet sound
.”

Crenshaw brought up his right knee; the table, with all its glass and silverware crashed against Schenck, but it was not Schenck, after all, who had the gun. Boucher had it, and he shot Crenshaw's pistol out of his hand.